Five Functional Approaches to Content Curation

“Aggregation” sometimes is contrasted to “curation” as a content marketing approach. As with all taxonomies, that sometimes is not the best way to approach the classification process, much less provide much insight on the activities a business-to-business marketer “should” be undertaking as part of a content marketing effort using content curation. The point is that “value” can be created in any number of ways when subject matter experts organize material. Perhaps the real objection to algorithm-driven “aggregation” is that it doesn’t add enough value. But all curation necessarily involves creating a collection, which might be called “aggregation.” In that sense, one cannot separate the “collecting” function (aggregation of related items) from the “curation” function (imparting meaning to the collection).